


on the bridge between water and clay

by boneflower (jjjat3am)



Category: Naruto
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Kisame is a softie really, Obito's had it rough, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-07 00:10:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14068602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jjjat3am/pseuds/boneflower
Summary: Okay, let's make something clear - Kisame isn't a hero. He's a disillusioned, dubiously loyal missing-nin, who abhors lies even though he's clearly living in one. Not someone you want out there, saving the world.Too bad Obito didn't get that memo.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know, my guys. This is a couple of years too late to be really relevant but I like Kisame a lot.

 

Kisame died knowing who he was and that was more than he ever could have expected for himself.

 

At the edge of his consciousness, he could feel Samehada cry out for him and he smiled, feeling the sharp pinpricks of teeth piercing his skin. There was a moment of pain, and then nothing.

 

For a while.

 

*

 

Kisame woke up to agony. It was relentless, like a thousand little blades piercing his skin, tearing him apart. His first thought was that he’d somehow gotten himself stuck in Itachi’s favourite genjutsu but he opened his eyes and the sky wasn’t red. 

 

And Itachi was still dead.

 

Painfully, he turned his head to look down at his body. It took a while because he couldn’t quite remember how to make it work properly as if the signals weren’t being transmitted around his body the right way. When he caught sight of himself he could see why.

 

Parts of his body wavered in and out of existence, whole chunks of tissue disappearing or reappearing in the wrong places, like they were trying to set themselves right and couldn’t quite manage. His eyesight went out for a moment, came back only for him to catch a glimpse of grey pillars all around them, the knowledge of his existence reaffirming himself and then - he had to go through the realization all over again because a part of his brain blanked out.

 

He would have screamed but he didn’t have vocal chords and when they were present, he didn’t have a mouth to use them with. It was agony, relentless and inescapable, and maybe he wasn’t wrong when he thought that dying was too easy.

  
  


*

  
  


There was a spiral in the unnatural greyness of the sky above Kisame. He stared at it, trying to corral his brain into remembering what it means. Not safety, but something familiar, which was close enough.

 

The portal opened ( _ Kamui _ , his brain helpfully supplied, right before it found it fit to inform him that there were more chunks of his torso missing) and something fell through it to land with a meaty thud on the ground. 

 

Kisame watched, as the figure moved, slowly, dragging itself across the floor up to where he was. It collapsed next to him, a pale hand reaching out to touch his chest, scarred face staring down at him. The touch made Kisame’s vision clear, some of the pain leeching away. Enough to concentrate, enough to understand.

 

“Kisame.” Obito. He stared down at Kisame, his face a mask of horror, and Kisame instinctively knew it isn’t because of his condition.

 

“Zetsu lied,” Obito told him, though his lips didn’t move and Kisame didn’t even have ears to hear him. “The Eye of the Moon Path doesn’t lead to peace or truth.”

 

He touched Kisame’s temple and he saw it, thousands chained to the holy tree, trapped in an illusion. Not a world of truth, but just another lie.

 

It’s actually kind of ironic. Kisame would smile if he remembered how to manipulate those muscles.

 

“I know I wasn’t any better than the other people who’ve lead you,” Obito said, and his voice is almost gentle, “but I’ve got one last mission for you if you choose to accept it.”

 

Kisame doesn’t really have a choice in the matter, honestly. He tries to convey the sentiment to Obito, but suddenly the ground beneath them moved, the grey sky wavering. It’s like someone knocking on the door, waiting to get in.

 

“She’s found me,” Obito looked terrified, “and we’re out of time.”

 

And before anything else could be said, Kisame’s world shattered.

 

Again.

 

*

 

“...remember, the codes are far more important than the lives of any member of the group,” Fuguki said and Kisame stared at him blankly, taking in their surroundings. Samehada called out to him, a joyous familiarity. 

 

They were in Fuguki’s office. The nearest chakra signature was several storeys below. 

 

Kisame is almost decade younger than he remembers being. There’s a katana strapped to his back, quiet and lifeless, and he didn’t remember its name. Fuguki was watching him expectantly.

 

A moment later, his head rolled across the floor of his office, frozen in its expectant expression and Kisame is strapping Samehada to his back.

 

He was out of Kiri before anyone could even sound the alarm.

  
  
  


*

 

It was simple enough to create a diversion where Zetsu will see it and investigate. The Mountains’ Graveyard is a treacherous place and no animal lives there, and the possible presence of another human is a curiosity that Zetsu cannot let go.

 

Kisame passed the screeching old man on his throne without a second glance. Madara Uchiha was formidable once but he’s barely a shadow of himself now, a skeleton dressed in rags and malice, tethered to the Gedō Mazō. Kisame’s focus was on Obito. He’s barely begun his healing process, his body still a mess of crushed tissue and vines attached to his body, tissue replaced by Hashirama cells, pale white and sickly next to the stark red of his wounds.

 

Kisame ripped the vines off him, despite the way it made Obito body convulse and his wounds split open. He picked him up and threw him over his shoulder. 

 

Madara was halfway off his throne, glaring at him. Kisame grabbed him by the scruff of his tattered robes, ripped out his eyes and pushed a fully formed Shark Bomb into his chest. Then he threw him at the holy tree and detonated it.

 

It was a nice explosion. Deidara would be proud.

 

*

 

The north of Wind Country is a desolate desert land, where nothing grows and nothing lives, except for the thin red scorpions watching him from under the sand and the occasional cactus that radiated judgement from the tips if its possibly poisonous needles. Kisame couldn’t blame them. This wasn’t where someone like him belonged. Sadly, that made it the perfect place to hide out.

 

The wind lashed at his face, driving tiny particles of sand in his eyes and mouth. Kisame sunk his face further into the collar of his coat (not Akatsuki red, never again) and pressed on. The sandstorm wasn’t deadly, not for someone like him, but he was getting tired, the weight of trauma pressing down on him, calling for him to rest.

 

Distractedly, he fed another trickle of chakra to the blade on his back. It almost purred with happiness, lapping it up like a kitten, and that was admittedly a boost to his ego, especially since his last memories, it was wrapped up cosy in a jinchūriki’s hands. Even in a pale imitation of their bond from before, the sword seemed happy enough by his side.

 

Happy enough, to accept fusing with another’s body when Kisame directed it to.

 

Obito barely had a heartbeat. His heart was one of the things crushed by the rocks, which in hindsight was rather ironic. Still, he was a steady and quiet weight on Kisame’s back and a constant chakra drain. The bandages hid the way his form melted into Samehada’s scaled body. 

 

It was a pain, cutting out all Hashirama cells out of Obito. Messy too, though the tissue hardly had the consistency of human flesh. It was a good thing the kid was unconscious, and that Samehada was there to fuse with the empty space left behind. There was a possibility that there was still some left behind, but hopefully not enough for Zetsu to be able to track them down. 

 

Zetsu was still out there in the world but without the Gedō Mazō, his madman dream just became a lot harder to achieve. Kisame had relished in taking out his support system, blowing up safehouses, killing off spies. He wasn’t naive enough to expect that Zetsu wouldn’t have backups, but it still filled him with a sense of accomplishment.

 

The sting of the sand grains against his skin cut off abruptly as Kisame stepped into the shelter of the cave. The sight of its grey walls was familiar, even if they were rougher, less tidy than when he was here last.

 

He’d been lead to this cave by Itachi, years ago. He’d never known how the other man found it in the first place. Itachi may have mentioned a mission, from before, though what Konoha shinobi were doing in the desolate north of Wind country was anyone’s guess.

 

In any case, the cave had been their refuge, the closest thing to a home base outside of Akatsuki’s base in Ame. This was where he’d taken Itachi when the first sights of his illness had appeared, when they needed, desperately, to stay in one place for a little while. There hadn’t been a sandstorm in their way that time, but the sight of the cave’s opening, barely a sliver against the cliff, and invisible unless one knew where to look, was a welcome one.

 

It was a strange sense of Deja vu, kneeling in the dirt, with another Uchiha at his back.

 

Kisame’s calves protested the movement, the muscles screaming at the overexertion he’d subjected them to. He was younger, here, and his body wasn’t used to wandering like it was before. His chakra wasn’t up to speed either, which was actually really annoying.

 

His mouth was dry. His skin stung. The sword hit scraped the dirt behind him in a motion that he’d never have allowed himself in a previous life, but Obito didn’t make a sound. Kisame put his hands on the rough dry wall of the cave and closed his eyes.

 

The thing about water was that you couldn’t really force it to go somewhere it didn’t want to. By Kisame’s modest estimations, he’d been one of the top water jutsu users in the world before he’d died. Once upon a time, he’d diverted rivers and called waves of destruction upon the land. Here, he just focused, reaching out, deep into the mountain, for that one hint of familiarity. He didn’t pull and he didn’t push, carefully shaping a path among the rock and ore, until very slowly, the barest trickle of water came from a hole in the wall, collecting in a natural basin formed by the rock. Kisame dipped his face in it, dirty and ice cold over his skin, and it was like for the first time in a long while he could breathe again.

 

On his back, encased in steel and chakra, Obito’s lungs expanded in a barely there breath.

 

 

  
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kisame acquires a new hobby.

 

Kisame couldn’t actually leave Samehada out of his sight while Obito was in it, because of how it required his chakra input all the time. Once Obito’s chakra coils started redeveloping maybe that would change, but for now, he was stuck cuddling up to his sword in the night and while that would hardly be the first time, it tended to  _ grate _ after a while. 

 

Pun unintended. Samehada’s scales were hidden under its bandages after all and it’s been a long time since they could harm him through negligence. And Obito was a quiet bedfellow, with how he barely had a pulse and only took a halting breath every half hour or so, the air straining to fill his reconstructed lungs through a nose that didn’t function yet.

 

The sandstorm outside the cave finally calmed down after a week, as if the desolate countryside had grumpily settled upon accepting their presence in it. 

 

Kisame breathed a sigh of relief. He still had plenty of rations sealed away, eaten dry or rehydrated with water from the stream, but sitting in one place for too long without being able to move was hell for any shinobi.

 

He secured the sword to his back and went exploring. Last time he’d been here, there had only barely been enough time to secure the immediate premises with traps and the sandstorms had been relentless. Looking at the landscape now, in the early morning, it looked wrecked under the pale sunshine, but there’s a snake coiling underneath a dune, tasting the air, and Kisame thought of Orochimaru and winced.

 

The mountain was taller in daylight and there was no way around it to the other side. All the maps he’d ever seen only specified that there was desert beyond, but he suspected that it was just the path’s unkindness that kept wayward explorers at bay.

 

“An adventure, right?” Kisame murmured. Obito, secure on his back, didn’t as much as twitch. 

 

Kisame sighed, coated his palms with chakra and began to climb.

 

What he found was unexpected.

 

The top of the mountain expanded in a small plateau, surrounded by stone on all sides, dry and desolate, but not entirely without life. There were a few bushes there, growing low and prickly, and something sad and dry that was attempting to pass itself off as grass. 

 

Something sparked in his mind, half-remembered, about supervising a handful of workers as they dug into the cold swamp, eventually draining it into farmable land. Kisame had been newly a chunin, and contemptuous of an assignment he’d seen as beneath him. But, he’d stood sentry, even though there was no one that attacked in the month he was there, and the village needed to eat. There had been some starving, even then. 

 

Kisame sighed at the idea taking form in his head. If only his past self could see him now. Better that Kisame had taken his place now, or the former would have expired from the indignity. He’d be the first to admit that he used to be rather arrogant.

 

“I guess we’re picking up a hobby,” Kisame said. Obito hardly stirred on his back. Kisame reflexively fed him another trickle of chakra. 

  
  


*

  
  


The nearest village was five hours away and that was at Kisame’s maximum running speed. The landscape was washed clean after the sandstorm, hardly a trace of vegetation in sight and it made for an easy if creepy, path. 

 

Once he neared the village, Kisame took stock of himself. There was no way he’d be entering it in his full blue-skinned and sharp teethed glory. And that wouldn’t even begin to explain why he had a teenager wrapped in bandages strapped to his back. He shaped his fingers through the seals of a transformation technique. It would hold for his purposes.

 

A barely there puff of steam and a tall nondescript man was standing in Kisame’s place. He took care making his feature seem as boring as possible, the kind of bland that slid through memory like smoke.

 

The village was small and seemed smaller still with how little people there were visible. The women talking in hushed voices in on their front lawn flinched away from his gaze. The few children he saw moved between alleyways like ghosts, formless and aimless. The men had jawlines tight in suspicion and sharpened with hunger, eyes hazy with what could be fever but could just as well be alcohol. 

 

“I don’t have any food to sell,” the shopkeeper told him, teeth bared in a snarl she wasn’t even trying to disguise as a smile. “The supply route is gone, erased by the sandstorms. There won’t be anything coming for a while."

 

‘And even if there were,’ said her glare, ‘I wouldn’t sell it to someone so obviously foreign.’

 

There was a spear mounted on the wall next to the counter and her eyes drifted to it as he made a show of looking around. The blade was rusted and the handle was falling apart, but he supposed that it gave her an illusion of safety.

 

“Do you have any seeds?” he asked her, prompting a loud guffaw.

 

“Nothing grows here!” she said incredulously. “What use are they to you?”

 

Kisame shrugged, careful not to dislodge the illusion. “Do you have them or not?”

 

She swore under her breath, pulling out white paper packets at random. _Daikon, Mitsuba, Nira, Taro, Nasu._ Not a bad haul. And she was right - most of them almost impossible to grow here, in the absence of water.

 

“I’ll take them,” he told her. She snorted and rolled her eyes. And then she named her price.

 

“That’s robbery,” he told her, but he was already reaching for his pouch.

 

“Call it what you want,” she said. She watched the bills he gave her as dispassionately as she watched everything else.

 

There was a beat of silence, as he swept the kanji marked packets into the pockets of his coat. The woman looked away from him, body tense. 

 

“What happened here?” he asked, softly, uncaring of the answer, but curious all the same.

 

She took a deep shuddering breath, her gaze suddenly far away. “I told them to boil the water,” she said. “The goats drank it, and they got sick. The men drank it, and they got sick. The children drank it, and they…”

 

She trailed off, gaze suddenly sharp on his face. “Get out of here,” she hissed, “we don’t like outsiders - we enough of our own problems!”

 

Kisame shrugged and sketched a bow, and left. The door slamming behind him was loud in the silence of the street. And that should have been the end of it. Obito was heavy on his back and the illusion itched on his skin, like a badly woven sweater. The night came deceptively quickly in the desert and it would make it much more difficult to pick up his own trail. 

 

There was a well, just down the street. Sturdy, stone blocks arranged in circular, rope marks smoothing its edges. The villagers watched him warily as he approached it - men shifted closer on the wooden front porches, faces ducking to whisper, and the curtains rustled ghost white in the windows of the houses.

 

There was a jutsu that every Kiri ninja learned in the Academy. It wasn’t much of a technique really, more like a chakra exercise but by the end of their bloody graduation, every genin knew to apply it as easy as breathing, coating their mouth with chakra that burned most pollution out of the consumed water. It was a prerequisite to learning any water jutsu, but it was also just good policy all around. The water supply in Kiri was routinely compromised by every missing nin with an aptitude for poison before they figured out a good enough filtration system and the habit stuck around. It also made it almost impossible to kill a Kiri nin through ingestible poison in their drinks, so that made it useful all around.

 

Kisame pulled out a full bucket. The water seemed ominously clean as he cupped it in his palm. It pooled in his hand, stayed by the microscales in his skin, hidden under the illusion. He brought it to his mouth and took a sip, grimacing as the chakra in his mouth burned through it. 

 

He allowed the droplets to slide off his palm and back into the well, marking it with his chakra so he could follow its path as it merged with the rest of the mass. It wasn’t a very cost-effective way of sensing but he didn’t need to probe that far to find the obstruction in the water, recoiling with a grimace at the foul feeling.

 

“Poisoned,” he announced loudly, turning to the nearest gaggle of people watching him with suspicion, “show me to your headman.”

 

It was a testament to their desperation that they actually did. She was a middle-aged woman, so similar to the shopkeeper that they could have been twins except for the jagged scar across her cheek. 

 

“You have a corpse stuck in your well,” he told her without preamble. “It’s poisoning your water supply.”

 

He wasn’t sure if it was the kind of thing that Obito would approve of. The one he’d first met certainly wouldn’t, the one who wore an orange mask and called himself Tobi. But the Obito he’d seen last, the one with terror-filled eyes and gentle fingers, that one might. And Itachi certainly would - taking the opportunity to carefully tease him about it later.

 

That was good enough, he supposed. He’d never claimed to have good role models.

 

The headwoman swore under her breath, seeming to age before his eyes. He had the feeling that ordinarily, he’d have to work harder to convince her, but sickness and death had wreaked havoc on her pride. As it was, she accepted him at his words.

 

“And,” Kisame hesitated. Her eyes rose up to meet his, dark and exhausted in a way only life could leave you. He remembered the children in the alleys, wraithlike, how they reminded him of Kiri in the future, before Terumi’s reign. “I can show you how to make a filtration system for your wells if anything like this happens again.”

 

It was a Kiri secret. The kind that would have him labelled a traitor if he weren’t one already. It was the knowledge that his former village used to make their neighbouring farmers loyal. The threat of poisoned water was enough to bring them to their knees.

 

“I don’t,” the headwoman started, paused and licked her chapped and bleeding lips, “we don’t have any way to repay you.”

 

Kisame shrugged. “I already bought what I needed from your grocery store,” he said, “and beyond that, I might need supplies when I pass by here again.”

 

“Anything,” she whispered, as he reached out for one of the empty scrolls on her desk and began sketching.

 

“Okay, see here,” he started and she bent her head next to his over the desk, her hands shaking.

 

*

 

The villagers were fishing in the well when Kisame left. They’d already managed to attach the hooks to something and were now heaving it out, barely kept in sync by the yelling of the shopkeeper. She had her spear in her hands, so presumably, they were afraid to cross her.

 

Kisame didn’t stick around for the big reveal. Water had a way of stipping flesh of all its defining characteristics, spitting out something that was less than human every time. He’d seen his share of waterlogged corpses. 

 

He set out on his run, dropping the illusion as soon as he was reasonably far away from the village. Hot, dry air blew against his face as he deftly avoided stepping on a scorpion as big as his foot. On his back, Obito breathed, slow but even. The packets of seeds burned in the pockets of his clothes.

 

“Not bad for a day’s work, huh?” he offered to Obito, who predictably didn’t reply. 

 

Kisame got back to their cave just before dark, the sky painting burning pinks and oranges. He ducked into the safe darkness before the colours could start overlapping and twisting. He ate a cold ration bar and drank deeply from the small stream. Then he curled up on his roll, curling up against Obito, and burying his face against Samehada’s bandages. If he closed his eyes and concentrated really hard, he could smell the tinge of saltwater clinging to them. 

 

*

 

The next morning found Kisame in the clearing above the caves, staring balefully at the ground. 

 

“This is a bad idea,” he said out loud. Obito, in his harness, didn’t even twitch.

 

“This jutsu wasn’t even made for this,” Kisame said, again to no response.

 

Eventually, he sighed, forming a long string of handseals. “Earth Release: Avalanche,” he muttered, slamming his hand against the surface.

 

The ground around him began to heave and tear, leaving jagged earth canals as thick as his forearms that ran parallel to each other. He waited until he was certain that his handiwork wouldn’t bring the mountain down, before forming another set of handseals.

 

“Water Release: Water Pillars,” he said, and the little stream he’d coaxed out of its path before came bursting through the surface, filling the canals he’d made and dripping over the edge like a waterfall. Carefully, Kisame slumped to his knees and guided the water back into the mountain rather than over the edge, returning it back to his underground paths, creating a loop.

 

He surveyed his work, sighing at the devastation. It looked even further from a fertile planting bed than when he’d started. He’d even dislodged the few bushes that grew there before.

 

“This was an awful idea,” he told Obito, “I’m not made for this.”

 

Samehada chirped at him, worried at how much chakra he’d expended. If Obito had an opinion he didn’t show it. 

 

Kisame sighed and dropped on his knees to dig.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi pals! Thank you so much for your enthusiastic response about this. Some people left me really interesting ideas in the comments and I'm hoping this turns into something you'll all find interesting.
> 
> Obito still hasn't woken up in this one, but never fear - in the next chapter I think we'll do a little time skip and you'll be able to see what Samehada has done to him. Right now, Kisame is carting him around on his back like a smol bebe.
> 
> Some other notes on this:  
> \- I'm not an irrigation expert. Obviously. But the canal method has been in use for a couple thousand years and it works pretty well. What Kisame does is a very rudimentary version.  
> \- I believe that the idea of Obito and Kisame farming in Wind Country came from [blackkat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackkat/pseuds/blackkat/works?fandom_id=13999), though it won't be a central theme to the story. Growing things is just fun!  
> \- The vegetables above I got from [this article](http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/47/7/831.full.pdf) about indigenous Japanese vegetables. They're all seed propagated and they're definitely not drought resistant for the most part but...let's pretend, okay? It's a good article though and I definitely recommend it if this is something you're interested in (by which I mean - talk to me about plants, always)
> 
> That's it! Let me know what you guys think so far? What are your predictions/wishes? What do you want to see more of?
> 
> I can't promise a concrete updating schedule, but I'm definitely invested in this story.

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, in canon Kisame can fuse himself with Samehada to heal his injuries. I thought that would come in handy.
> 
> So, do I continue?


End file.
